The Second Half (2 page)

When free speech was mentioned, Sturman just laughed.

‘Does that mean I can go down the street and abuse someone? Freedom of speech!’

He said that before we were even up and running.

‘If your case is based on freedom of speech, don’t give me that nonsense.’

I said to myself, ‘It’s all we’ve got.’

He was brilliant. But he had a good case. And he had the video evidence. It was probably the easiest few quid he ever earned. He didn’t have to break a sweat.

TWO

Footballers are intelligent. There were no rumblings in the dressing room; there was no ‘The empire’s crumbling.’

We’d come straight from the west coast of America – I think it was Seattle – and a few of us were left out of the team. I liked playing in every game but when the manager left me out of this one I was quite relieved because I was knackered; we all were – jet-lagged. I remembered sitting beside Ryan Giggs in the dugout, and the two of us were laughing at some of the other lads out on the pitch.

We were playing Sporting Lisbon pre-season, to celebrate the opening of their new stadium, and I saw how good Ronaldo was that day. He was playing for Sporting and he was up against John O’Shea. Sheasy ended up seeing the club doctor at half-time because he was having dizzy spells; he was being twisted inside-out.

The club had been watching Ronaldo, and I think they concluded negotiations after the game. We always joked with Sheasy that he’d sealed the deal by playing like a fuckin’ clown against him. In fairness to Sheasy, he was jet-lagged, like the rest of us.

Ronaldo arrived for the start of the 2003–4 season, and I liked the lad straightaway. He had a nice presence about him, and a
good attitude. What impressed me most was that he’d been given the option of staying in Lisbon for another year, on loan, but he said no; he’d come over to Manchester straightaway. I thought it was a good, brave decision – because he was only seventeen. After the first few days, watching him train, my reaction was, ‘This lad is going to be one of the world’s greatest players.’ I didn’t say it publicly, because I’d always be wary of building a player up too early – or knocking him down.

He looked like a player. You have to look the part, and he did. Zidane looked like a player – and Ronaldo looked like a player. The shape, the body language – they were there. A bit of arrogance, too. But he’d a nice way about him; he was very likeable. We forget that he was very heavily criticised when he first came on the scene. He was going down too quickly when tackled, his final product wasn’t good enough. But – again – he was only seventeen, a kid. I was playing youth football for Rockmount, in Cork, at that age. He was amazing. He was immediately one of the hardest working players at United. Most of the players I knew worked hard, but Ronaldo had the talent on top of the work rate.

He was good-looking and he knew it. He was vain in that sense – at the mirror. He was a big lad, a big unit. I’d think, ‘Good on yeh.’ Looking at some of the other lads in front of the mirror, I’d think, ‘Yeh fuckin’ nugget.’ But Ronaldo had an innocence to him, and a niceness. I don’t think he ever slackened off, or that he was ever more worried about the mirror than his game. I always felt that football was his love. He’s still criticised for going down too easily when tackled, and he was hammered for winking after Wayne Rooney was sent off in England’s game against Portugal in the 2006 World Cup. But that’s the game, and he plays it. It’s embedded in the foreign players, in their style of play – winning a free-kick, getting an opponent sent off. It’s
natural to them. If they get tackled near the box, they’re going to go down.

Everyone loves the Gazza stories, the tragedies, but it’s great to see a player fulfil his potential. Ronaldo had a lot of critics but I think people just got tired of chipping away, and conceded that he was due a bit of credit. You could see it as unfortunate that he’s been around at the same time as Messi, but Messi gave him a target – ‘I want to be better than him.’

Younger players bring a different energy, a lack of fear; they’ll try things. I was thirty-two at the start of the ’03–’04 season, but it wasn’t like I was thirty-eight. I didn’t feel that I was being pushed aside. But, all the same, I knew that the club was like a machine – the Ronaldos would come in, and the Rooneys. When I was a young player myself, I’d seen Bryan Robson and Steve Bruce leaving. So when you reach the age I was now, you’re always looking at the exit door. I wasn’t fearful, or threatened. There was that understanding: this is the game. You reach thirty-two and you’re coming to the edge of the cliff. A sports psychologist who once came to United said that the descent could be gradual, or ‘Bump!’ – you’re over the cliff. You just hope it will be gradual.

I went downhill at United, in a nice way. I was still playing. I was doing okay; I wasn’t embarrassing myself. But I wasn’t dominating games like I used to. The great thing about top players coming to your football club is, you want to impress them. It’s their job to impress you, but you want to impress them. That’s why there’s a lift when a top player arrives. ‘Fuckin’ hell, I don’t want him to think I’m crap. I don’t want him thinking, “He’s on his way out”.’

The dynamics of the club were changing. Huge figures had left. Peter Schmeichel went in 1999, and he was very hard to replace. We’d had Fabien Barthez, Mark Bosnich, Taibi, Roy
Carroll. Now we had Tim Howard. But it would be 2005, when Edwin van der Sar arrived, before Schmeichel was really replaced.

I had a bust-up with Peter when we were on a pre-season tour of Asia, in 1998, just after I came back from my cruciate injury. I think we were in Hong Kong. There was drink involved.

Myself and Nicky Butt had had a night out, and we bumped into Peter at the hotel reception desk. It was about two in the morning. We said a few words to one another – a bit of banter, a bit of stick. I went to Nicky’s room for some room service, had a sandwich, got up to go – and Peter was waiting for me, outside the room.

There’d been a little bit of tension between us over the years, for football reasons. Peter would come out shouting at players, and I felt sometimes that he was playing up to the crowd – ‘Look at me!’ He was probably also doing it for his concentration levels, keeping himself on his toes. But I felt he did it too often, as if he was telling the crowd, ‘Look at what I have to deal with.’ I wouldn’t say we disliked each other, but we weren’t best buddies either.

He said, ‘I’ve had enough of you. It’s time we sorted this out.’

So I said, ‘Okay.’

And we had a fight. It felt like ten minutes. There was a lot of noise – Peter’s a big lad.

I woke up the next morning. I kind of vaguely remembered the fight. I was sharing with Denis Irwin, and we were a few minutes late for the bus going to the airport. We got a call from the physio: ‘Where are you?’ Denis was one of the best pros you could ever come across, so being late for the bus tarnished him; you’d have thought he’d been caught with drugs or something. He was having a go at me.

I remember saying to him, ‘I think I was fighting last night.’

My hand was really sore and one of my fingers was bent backwards.

The manager had a go at us as we were getting on the bus, and people were going on about a fight in the hotel the night before. It started coming back to me – the fight between myself and Peter.

Throughout the flight, Peter wore his sunglasses. He never took them off, and it wasn’t very sunny.

We landed – I don’t remember where. When the team arrived at a new destination for a game, two of the players had to go and do a press conference. And this time, it just happened to be myself and Peter.

In the meantime, Nicky Butt had been filling me in on what had happened the night before. Butty had refereed the fight. He even got a new nickname for it – Mills Lane, after the famous boxing referee. Anyway, Peter had grabbed me, I’d head-butted him – we’d been fighting for ages.

At the press conference, Peter took his sunglasses off. He had a black eye. The questions came at him.

‘Oh, Peter, what happened to your eye?’

He said, ‘I just got an elbow last night, at training.’

And that was the end of it. The tour finished eight or nine days later and nobody said anything – none of the staff, nobody. My hand had recovered, and Peter’s black eye had faded. But the first day back at the training ground, the manager pulled myself and Peter into his office.

He said, ‘The two of you were fighting.’

He knew exactly where we’d fought – I think he mentioned the twenty-seventh floor. He told us that we were a disgrace to the club, and that we’d woken Bobby Charlton up, that Bobby had come out of his room and seen us.

‘Do you have anything to say?’

Peter put his hand up.

‘Gaffer, I want to apologise. It was all my fault. I was waiting for Roy in the corridor. I take responsibility.’

The manager went, ‘Oh, you’re a fuckin’ joke’, and kicked us out of his office.

Peter took responsibility for the fight, which was good. I admired him for it. But Sir Bobby could have tried to break it up.

Looking back at colossal career milestones, I remember many events very clearly, but quite often I don’t know what years we won the League. But I do know we’d nicked it from Arsenal the previous season, 2002–3.

We were playing away to Tottenham on a Sunday in late April, and then at home to Charlton the following week. We were travelling on the day before the game, by bus to Stockport station, then train down to London. Arsenal were playing that afternoon at Bolton, and we needed them to slip up. I drove to the Four Seasons Hotel, in Manchester, where we were leaving the cars before getting on the bus.

That bus journey from the Four Seasons to the railway station in Stockport became one of the highlights of my career. Arsenal had been two up when we got on the bus, so they were now ahead of us in the table. Then the news came through that Bolton had pulled it back to 2–1. Djorkaeff had scored for them. And just as we arrived at the station, Bolton made it 2–2.

We still had games to play and win, but we knew on the bus – and it wasn’t cockiness; we were hopping around like a load of kids, hugging one another – we knew the title was ours that day. If you’d passed us at Stockport railway station, you would have seen a load of men on a bus, jumping up and down. We were back in it and we knew we wouldn’t let go.

Finishing on top was never easy. It’s been said about the Liverpool team of the eighties that they had a drawer full of medals
and their coach, Ronnie Moran, would say, ‘Take one if you think you deserve it.’ It always looked easy for Liverpool, although I’m sure it wasn’t. But I watched them when I was a kid, winning all the time. When I became a player I learnt, quickly, that winning League titles is not easy. We had to fight for our success. But we were hungry. I don’t think we were ever blasé about previous successes. I never thought we could live off the past and switch off for a year or two.

The top sports people aren’t content with a single victory or triumph. I was surrounded by players who were like that. We were all pushing one another along. The message came from the manager and the fans: ‘Don’t relax just because you’ve won a few now.’ You win something and you say, ‘It’s gone’, and then you move on. I can be critical of myself for not enjoying the experience of winning, but – it was part of my DNA – I just wanted to go on and win more.

Arsenal were good. Arsène Wenger was reinventing the game, apparently. Sugar lumps at half-time. They were a very good counter-attacking team. The previous Arsenal teams, under George Graham and Bruce Rioch, had been a rigid 4–4–2. They would always have held their positions; you could almost predict where each player would be. Now, under Wenger, they had more pace, they had more movement; they were moving positions, interacting. They had people like Overmars, Bergkamp, Henry. They were changing not just the face of Arsenal but the face of the Premiership, too. Pace, players moving into different positions, away from the 4–4–2; brilliant on the counter-attack, and much harder to play against. They could hurt you much quicker now. I think Arsenal took counter-attacking to a new level. Not just away from home – at home, too. And they were a team of big characters, big personalities. Vieira, Keown, Campbell, Adams,
Henry. They might just have had an edge over us. But it was good for us. We had to up our game.

Myself and Vieira were at the forefront of the rivalry between the two teams. Neither of us went out of our way to become – almost – the symbols of that time. Your position in your team will, in a sense, mould you into the kind of character you become, and what part you’re going to play in the club. I’ve worked with Lee Dixon, who was with Arsenal, and Denis Irwin, at United. You just knew they were full-backs – brilliant full-backs. But you don’t see full-backs leading many teams. I think the fact that myself and Patrick were playing in the middle of the park made us the centre of things. The timing couldn’t have been better. Our teams were in their prime, both of us liked to tackle, our games were very physical and – at the time – he irritated me and I’m guessing I irritated him a little bit. Maybe he loved me – I don’t know. But I didn’t like him. But I also knew he was doing the best for his team, like I was doing for mine. ‘I don’t like you, but I look forward to playing against you.’ And there was always the thought: I wouldn’t have minded if he’d been in my team.

The tension, the build-up to the games, made great TV.

As Arsenal were getting stronger, we were having a dip. Although it didn’t show at the start of the season.

We won four of our first five games. This isn’t arrogance, but that was the form we would have expected. Although we were beaten by Southampton. Tim Howard made some great saves – but that was what he was there for; he’d brought his gloves. Kevin Beattie scored their goal, a header from a Graeme Le Saux corner.

We drew 0–0 with Arsenal. Ruud Van Nistelrooy missed a penalty; he hit the crossbar. Vieira had been sent off, and there was a bit of argy-bargy afterwards, because the Arsenal players were blaming Ruud for getting Patrick sent off; they said he’d
overreacted. I was holding Ruud back that day. Giggsy and Ronaldo were charged with bringing the game into disrepute, along with a couple of the Arsenal lads.

We always ended up having a laugh about the charges – the fines.

‘I hope they fuckin’ hit you with a big fine.’

Giggsy was fined, and we knew Giggsy liked his few bob. When I’d come back from the Håland hearing, there’d been no sympathy in the dressing room.

‘Oh, you fucker – that’s a heavy one. How are you going to deal with that?’